Content and data providers around the world are deploying more interactive applications by, for example, creating enhancements to a video stream. Enhanced television (ETV) applications may rely on embedding various types of data in the video stream, including programs, images, and triggers. ETV may support a growing variety of program applications, such as interactive advertising, game shows, news, sports events, voting applications, impulse upgrade promotions, and E-commerce applications.
As a new revenue opportunity, content and data providers are aggressively deploying new ETV applications on a variety of different content, in which a number of applications focus on enhanced advertisements. Advertising enhancements may be distributed in-band, for example, and the content provider typically has no easy way to determine whether an advertisement or an enhancement was actually delivered correctly and completely. However, in order to maintain statistics or collect revenue, the provider or operator must be able to verify that an enhanced advertisement or related data was correctly distributed to and/or displayed on end-user equipment. Traditional approaches for verification may be inefficient, non-scalable, and expensive to the provider or operator.